My Notes app is an Idea Graveyard
I don't afraid of failing life. I’m afraid of wasting life.
It's April 2nd, 6:30 pm.
My phone lights up. A notification from Google Keep.
It was my "Someday Maybe" List. 6 ideas and projects I've been meaning to start "sometime." The same ideas for three years straight.
Ugh, I leaned back in my chair. I forgot about them. I wrote them when I felt inspired and excited.
Now they’re rotting on a digital list.
Never seeing what’s in front of you.
I always get reminded of the scene from Mr. Nobody (2009).
The last human on earth to die of old age tells a reporter,
At my age the candles cost more than the cake. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid I haven't been alive enough. It should be written on every school room blackboard: Life is a playground - or nothing.
—Nemo Nobody, Mr. Nobody (2009)
There are so many ideas to explore and experiences to encounter that it slips through my fingers. Life moves fast on autopilot. Going through the routine of walking up, making breakfast, work, making dinner, and sleeping.
But then something surfaces.
Evidence of what you wanted but never continued. A reminder of why you started in the first place and why you keep going. Every time I see the list, I realize it’s something I forgot.
With work, life, career, those other ideas I had get shelved. Then buried. Then decay.
One of my fears is realizing I had the golden goose but never realized it. The golden ticket but never cashed it. Had all the ingredients but never cooked it. Studied deeply but never made it real.
Like replacing childhood wonders with adult realism, everything was already there, but I wasn’t seeing it correctly. Or maybe I couldn’t see it all because I forgot how.
Something so obvious, so in front of you, jumping, shouting, and screaming, but I couldn’t see it.
It’s called Inattentional Blindness.
3 years. 6 ideas. Still waiting.
Not buried treasures needing excavation, but ghosts. A digital haunting of what could have been. Six apparitions hovering over their own headstones.
We call them ghosts not because they're dead, but because we look right through them. They're not hidden. They're not buried. They're right there—perched in plain sight—while we look everywhere else.
Psychologists call it inattentional blindness.
Our brains filter out the constant to focus on the changing. It's why you don't notice the hum of your refrigerator until it suddenly stops.
Our oldest, most persistent ideas become that background hum.
Always there, never noticed.
Until one day, a notification brings them back into focus, and I realized: that idea wasn't just an idea.
It was a version of me trying to emerge.
Instead of ignoring it, I looked at it.
I looked at the ideas on the list. Most weren’t possible right now, but one aspect stood out to me. Half of my ideas involved fiction writing.
These weren't just random projects. They were keys—keys to rooms inside myself I'd locked without knowing.
It wasn't just a project I hadn't started.
It was a door I locked without knowing. A conversation I hadn't finished.
A promise I'd made to myself but never kept.
I had forgotten how much I loved writing.
And suddenly I could see it—not as an item on a list, but as a living thing that had been patiently waiting for me to notice it again.
Life is a search for Keys.
This is why we're drawn to certain books, films, or conversations. They're not solutions themselves—they're keys that fit the locks we carry within us.
We keep searching outside for answers when the doors that need opening are inside. All of life became a game of searching for the keys to unlock the door where our inner child lay stowed away.
It’s where those late-night ideas come from. The clawing in our stomachs that this isn’t right. The pull to a new direction.
What if our job isn't to excavate buried treasure but simply to see what's already in front of us?
What if the tragedy isn't that we lack ideas, but that we've become blind to the ones we already have?
Your Google Keep, your Notion databases, your Moleskine notebooks—they're not graveyards for dead ideas. They're waiting rooms for living ones.
They don't need you to resurrect them. They just need you to see them again, as if for the first time.
Pick one today. Not the most promising one. Not the most practical one.
Just one.
Look at it. Really look at it.
Then do one small thing to acknowledge it's alive.
Write one paragraph. Make one sketch. Have one conversation.
Because ideas, like ghosts, don't need much to make their presence known.
They just need someone who's willing to see them.